Category: Uncategorized

I received the following email last week:

Dear Professor Bellemare,

I noticed that you taught the course “Microeconomics of International Development Policy” while at Duke which I find very appealing. Your course’s content online appears to overlap to some extent with an applied development policy course that I will begin teaching at [university name redacted] as a part-time fellow next academic term. As this is the first time I am teaching this course and thus have no course materials and also have many other time commitments … I wanted to ask you if you may be willing to provide a large favor and possibly share and forward your class presentations that I could use as a point of orientation to prepare the specific content of my class presentations?

I would be extremely grateful if this may be possible as it would help me not to start completely from scratch and I would of course be willing to offer a favour in return (for example, I could share [data sets] if these may be relevant for you, as I have worked with [institution redacted] over the past five years and have most of these data sets …). And I could of course forward you the presentations for this course once they are prepared.

I very much look forward to your response and would be very thankful if we could find a solution.

Best,
[Name redacted]

I hesitated before writing this post, but after discussing it with a colleague with whom I was in the field last week, he suggested that it could make for a good “teachable moment.” Besides, there so many unwritten rules in academia that I thought I should at least try to make this one explicit to current graduate students and newly minted PhDs. Maybe this is a rule only to me; if so, I’d like to hear from colleagues about how they view situations such as this one, in the comments section below.

The rule has two parts:

I had promised myself I would resume posting regularly in August after taking the summer off from blogging, but it’s a busy month (as you read this, I am in the Peruvian Altiplano launching a field research project on quinoa), so here are the slides for my presentation of my paper with Nick Carnes titled “Why Do Members of Congress Support Agricultural Protection?” at this year’s annual meetings of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.

This paper is now a revise and resubmit at Food Policy, and a revised, improved version is available; email me if you are interested in reading it.

The graduate student section (GSS) of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association had asked my Ohio State colleague Brian Roe, co-editor of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics,  to present on the topic of how to publish in academic journals at a GSS-organized session on academic communication at last week’s annual meetings in Minneapolis.

Because his flight was leaving too early to allow him to do so, Brian asked me to sub for him. Here are my slides for that talk, in .pdf format. Because of my audience, this is agricultural-and-applied-economics-centric, but I think those of you in other fields of economics and in other disciplines can find something useful in there.